ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that legal sociology and comparative law can be closely compatible. It suggests that difficulties in the relations of legal sociology and comparative law arise from difficulties in conceptualizing the scope of the enterprises, and from changes over time in the way each of them has been understood. The chapter also argues that comparative law and legal sociology are interdependent and, while each of these research enterprises has a wide variety of appropriate aims, their central, most general and most ambitious scientific projects. It considers three orientations as a basis for examining what a sociological perspective can offer comparatists today. The orientations are Alan Watson's legal transplants thesis, the application of autopoiesis theory to comparative law, and the recent use by some comparative lawyers of the concept of legal culture. A way of avoiding the collapse of any internal-external distinction that excludes sociology from explanations of legal development might be through the use of systems theory.
